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Recitatif by Toni Morrison
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Recitatif

Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Length 1 hour 54 minutes
Language English
Narrators Zadie Smith & Bahni Turpin

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Brought to you by Penguin.

'Toni Morrison was the lodestar who inspired us' Bernadine Evaristo

Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old, when they were thrown together as roommates in a girls' shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only to meet again later at a diner, a grocery store and then at a protest. The two women are seemingly at opposite ends of every problem but, despite their conflict, the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them is undeniable.

Recitatif keeps Twyla's and Roberta's races ambiguous throughout the story. We know that one is white and one is black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage?

This story is a masterful exploration of what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, of race and the relationships that shape our lives. Now with a new introduction by Zadie Smith, it is as radically compelling and relevant today as it was when first written nearly forty years ago.


'Toni Morrison is the greatest chronicler of the American experience that we have ever known' Tayari Jones

'Her work is an act of giving her community back to itself, so that people - African-Americans but the diaspora as well - can see and witness themselves' Diana Evans


ยฉ Toni Morrison 1983 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Toni Morrison (Author)
Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Americaโ€™s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

Zadie Smith (Introducer, Reader)
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives. The Fraud is her first historical novel.

Toni Morrison (Author)
Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Americaโ€™s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

Zadie Smith (Introducer, Reader)
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives. The Fraud is her first historical novel.

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Audiobook details

Author:

Narrators:
Zadie Smith & Bahni Turpin

ISBN:
9781529196832

Length:
1 hour 54 minutes

Language:
English

Publisher:
Random House

Publication date:

Edition:
Unabridged

Illustration of person opening a gift

The perfect last-minute gift

Audiobook credit bundles can be delivered instantly, given worldwide, and support local bookstores!

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

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Reviews

This smart slippery tale... [is] highly relevant to our times... [Recitatif] serves as a challenge to contemporary novels that prefer to take refuge in racial orthodoxy than unsettle it, as Morrison so brilliantly does here A compelling exploration of race and relationships Genius So thought-provoking you'll want everyone you know to read it Expand reviews
The perfect last-minute gift Shop credit bundles